


Gone, But Not Forgotten

by enthusiasmgirl



Category: Daredevil (TV), Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Coma, Daredevil Has a High Body Count, Dreamscapes, Everybody Dies, Except Foggy Don't Worry, Forgiveness, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Magic, Post-Season/Series 02 Fix-It, Reconciliation, Sorcerers, Surreal, The People v. Frank Castle, he's fine, or so he says
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-10 19:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 11,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8933503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enthusiasmgirl/pseuds/enthusiasmgirl
Summary: Foggy wakes up in a bizarre version of Hell's Kitchen where ghosts keep talking to him, he can't seem to stop walking in circles, and something menacing is lurking in the shadows. Is he dead? Dreaming? Doctor Strange has the answer, but Foggy's not going to like it.





	1. Fogwell's Gym

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChaoticDemon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaoticDemon/gifts).



> **NOTE OFF THE TOP:** You do not have to have seen Doctor Strange to enjoy this fic! It's written in such a way where he plays a role, but a relatively minor one. If you know he's a sorcerer and that other sorcerer's exist in the MCU now, then you're good.
> 
> Anyway...
> 
> Yay! It's Christmas! And this year, I decided to give everyone... character death, blood, murder and a reminder that Daredevil is a really violent show. Oops. Sorry, everyone. (At least it's not a lump of coal?)
> 
> The prompt I received was, simply, "ghost story", with an indication that my recipient in this year's Secret Santa also liked surrealism and angst, and that major character death was a no-no but that ghosts were fine. They also wanted a happy ending, which believe it or not this fic kind of delivers.
> 
> BONUS: Their other two prompts were "de-aging" and Foggy being paired with an Avenger somehow, one of which is only kind of here and the other of which is definitely present! Plus, it checks off the "killer instinct" prompt on my Bingo card, since it deals with who Foggy thinks has them and who doesn't, enough that I got away with naming a chapter that. I am the master of fanfiction multi-tasking! :)
> 
> Thanks to the many people who helped me with feedback and cheerleading to get this fic done, including [marmolita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita/pseuds/marmolita), [stubliminalmessaging](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stubliminalmessaging/works) and [prettybirdy979](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettybirdy979/pseuds/prettybirdy979).

"I'm fine," Foggy told himself silently as he opened his eyes and blinked, looking around. "I'm fine. I'm alive. I'm fine." A too familiar mantra lately.

A moment ago, he'd been staring down the determined gaze of a man about to murder him in cold blood, but he didn't see that man in front of him now. His memory of it happening was clear, even if he had no clue how he'd suddenly gone from that situation to this one, waking up on the floor of Fogwell's gym. Maybe Daredevil had flipped into the room and saved him, and he'd hit his head in the process and been knocked unconscious.

As that thought occurred to him, the "thwap, thwap, thwap" of a punching bag behind him entered his consciousness, and he realized that he must have been right.

"Thanks for the save, buddy, but can I get a little help here?" he asked, checking his head for lumps or bruises and finding none. "What the hell happened?"

The steady beat continued. He turned around. Sure enough, there was Matt hitting the bag with that determined look on his face that always meant trouble.

"Matt!" Foggy yelled. He didn't turn around, didn't stop. Foggy watched him move, watched the bag sway slightly with each focused and powerful hit it took. As he watched, a feeling of wrongness started to creep up his spine. What was he doing there?

"Matt!" he yelled a second time.

"He can't hear you," someone said from beside him, and Foggy startled. Somehow he hadn't noticed the other man in the room with them, standing half-hidden in the shadows. "He can't see you either," the man said. "I'm not sure how he's able to hit the bag every time, but he is. I think that's my fault."

Foggy examined the stranger carefully, his confusion only growing as he took in his sturdy build and slumped over posture leaning against the doorway observing Matt. He was wearing a flowing robe, and his hands were in its pockets.

"Matt?" Foggy asked, quieter this time, turning his body back to face his friend again. Still no response. "What's wrong with him?" He awkwardly pushed himself up to his feet.

"I told you," replied the stranger, sadly.

Foggy suddenly felt as though maybe he had, and he'd forgotten. Why did the man in the shadows seem so familiar?

"Who are you?" Foggy asked.

"Nobody," came the reply. "Not to you. And not to him. Not anymore."

"But you were someone, once? Weren't you?" Foggy asked, understanding dawning on him even as it also made him suddenly afraid. "Battlin' Jack Murdock," he said, awe creeping into his voice. He pointed to the flyer on the wall near them, peeling and yellowed, advertising "THE FIGHT OF THE YEAR".

He stepped closer to the man and suddenly the light hit him at the right angle and Foggy knew he was right. He wasn't sure how he knew it, but he did. The strong jaw. The angle of his nose. Matt had described his father once. It was the first time Foggy ever heard Matt sound like he genuinely missed being able to see. "You look like him," Foggy couldn't keep himself from saying. "Or... he looks like you, I mean."

Jack smiled slightly at that. "Does he?"

"Well, yeah," Foggy replied, still unsure what was happening but finding himself strangely compelled to go along with it. "You can see for yourself. He's right there."

"It's not him, though," Jack said, shaking his head. "It can't really be. It's just my imagination."

Foggy's brow furrowed at that. Was that was this was? "No," he said. "It's not. It has to be my imagination. I'm the one who has to be dreaming. And I know him. Better than I know my own reflection." Did he though? He turned around to look behind him and suddenly he wasn't sure. In fact, suddenly the figure in front of the punching bag didn't look like anyone in particular. There was only an undulating shadow, vague and unreal. Foggy stepped back in terror. "What's happening to him?"

"It's you," Jack said. "I thought this was me, but you brought me here. You're doing this." Foggy felt two strong hands on his shoulder and was yanked around to face the ghost again. "Who are you?"

"Foggy Nelson," Foggy told him. "I'm Foggy Nelson." The second time was to remind himself.

"No," Jack asked, urgency in his voice. "Who are you to him?"

Foggy didn't want to turn around again, to face the shadow, but Jack forced him to. Only it wasn't a shadow. Instead, this time it was a boy. He couldn't have been more than ten. He was wearing sweats and had hair that nearly fell to his shoulders and bangs that looked like they'd been cut using a bowl. But the look in his eyes. That was the same. Matt.

"I don't know," Foggy told Jack. "I don't know." The only thing he did know, the horrifying realization continuing to creep from his spine to his stomach, was that he was likely as dead as the man who'd asked him the question.

Suddenly, there was a large banging from the other end of the room, like an assault on the door. And scratching. Desperate scratching like fingernails against wood. Something was coming.

"We need to leave," Jack told him.

"But Matt..." Foggy whispered, panicked.

"He'll be okay," Jack told him as he stared at the child still keeping his rhythm with the bag, swift and furious. "He'll have to be."

Jack forced him through a door that Foggy was certain shouldn't have been there. As they ran they heard the splintering of wood and a piercing whine behind them, a churning, sorrowful sound like nothing he had ever heard before. But when he turned around, there was only an empty alley. The door was gone. And he was alone.


	2. Foggy Nelson v. The People v. Frank Castle

"Hello?" Foggy yelled, "Anyone?"

He'd been wandering the streets of the city for what felt like hours, but might have been an actual eternity. He wasn't sure. Nothing made sense, and he wasn't sure he wanted it to. Hell's Kitchen wasn't that big and he should have left it by now, but every turn he took only led him back to familiar streets, familiar locations, giving him the unsettling feeling of being lost in the place that he'd lived all his life.

And he was still alone. In all that time wandering, he hadn't seen a single other person in a city of millions that never slept. There was no traffic. No honking of cars or taxi drivers yelling at pedestrians or bikers to get out of their way out their windows. No children playing. No businessmen bumping into people in their rush to get to work. Hell's Kitchen had never been empty in Foggy's lifetime. Not after 9/11. Not after the Battle of New York. The solitude was unnerving, the quiet unnatural. Briefly, he wondered if Matt would appreciate it more than him if he were there. Then he realized that for Matt to be there, he would have to be dead too and he took the thought back immediately.

Eventually, he just... stopped. He decided not to do it anymore. He fell to his knees, feeling out of breath even though he wasn't tired, and propped himself up with his palms on the concrete sidewalk. And that felt real. Rough and heated by the sunlight and tangible through his skin. It dug into him, just a little. Foggy held onto that as the tears started to fall, dripping down onto the back of his hands as he knelt there.

This couldn't be it, could it? A short lifetime of wondering what his future would be like, imagining distant somedays, and he was already out of time?

He closed his eyes and remembered the last words he'd heard before all of this, before he woke up in his current state of disconcerting uncertainty. "I'm going to give you what you deserve." He remembered the last thing he saw. The face of Jacob Evans. Son of Harold Evans. AKA a victim of Foggy's most recent client.

"I'm going to force you to face the ghost of my father and every other person whose blood is on your hands," the man who killed him had explained. "You'll never be able to escape them."

And as Foggy remembered, the chill crept back up his spine. And his hands felt wrong. Slimier and stickier than the wetness of the tears should have felt. He knew before he opened his eyes what he would see, but it still made his heart thump faster in his chest. They were so red. Crimson like Matt's suit. Like sin. Like hellfire.

And as he looked up at the face of Harold Evans, bullet hole still oozing blood just above his eyebrows, he wished he'd gone to church with Matt more often. If only just because it would have meant a few more hours he'd spent with his friend.

"You're responsible for this," Harold said.

Foggy looked him directly in the eyes. "No," he said. "I'm not." And he meant it. He knew that it was true. It's what made his death feel like such a waste.

Suddenly, Harold looked confused. And Foggy watched, just as confused, as his undead accuser slowly turned to dust, drifting away on the breeze from the tip of his head to his toes until he was gone, and the particles that used to be him floated gently away like dandelion puffs on a spring day.

But Foggy's hands were still red. And as the form of Harold faded and Foggy stood up, new forms appeared around him. Ones he couldn't dismiss as easily.

Grotto. District Attorney Reyes. And more, so many more, standing still and motionless in the roads and on the sidewalks, staring him down. Leather-clad bikers. Red haired Irish gang members. People still seeking justice and who would never find it because of Foggy's interference.

"Nelson?" the District Attorney asked him, confused. "My daughter," she asked with a sob. "Who's with her? Is she safe?"

"I don't know," Foggy told her. "I can't help you. I'm sorry."

She lurched towards him slowly, and behind her all the others also began to move, their pace slow but still terrifying. Foggy knew that he should move, that he should run, but his body wouldn't respond. He was paralyzed, forced to stand and watch as they came closer, blood still dripping from his fingertips.

He began to cry again and looked down, and for the first time his mind registered that at some point an ominous darkness had fallen over the city, and that the concrete underneath him was now a chalky white, illuminated by the glow of a streetlamp overhead. The white seemed to stop a few feet from him, and it dawned on him that it was an outline. A shape. He looked back up and around, recognized it as a target drawing the crowd around him closer. He was standing in the middle of a crude skull, a symbol of the thing, of the person, that bound them all together.

He trembled. But he remained where he was. And he closed his eyes and waited, resigned.

But no retribution came. There was no scratching or tugging or fists slamming into him. Instead, there was only an unfamiliar whooshing sound and a sense of weightlessness.

He opened his eyes.

The nightmare version of Hell's Kitchen was gone. Instead, he was in a cavernous room with ornate wooden carvings on the walls and a giant stained glass window that sunlight poured through.

"Mr. Nelson," said an odd yet stern-looking man with a mustache standing in front of him. He was wearing a flowing red cape, which shouldn't have been the strangest thing Foggy encountered in all of this but was. "I'm afraid I have something very alarming to tell you."

Foggy looked down at his hands again, but the blood was gone. Instead, he was surprised to find that they seemed to be fading from existence. The outline of them remained, but he could see the polished wooden floors of wherever he was through them. "I'm a ghost," he told the stranger sadly. "I'm a ghost and I'm really dead."

"No," came the apologetic reply. "You're not. That's the problem."


	3. The Glass Half Full

"I'm fine," Foggy said to himself. He tried to calm himself, reminded himself that weirder things had happened to him. He thought of mystical ninjas climbing up hospital walls, of deranged killers handcuffed to hospital beds, and of his best friend dressed like the devil under layers of armor. It didn't help. "I'm fine," he told himself again, willing it to be true as he always did. "I'm sort of alive, which is better than dead, so that's good."

"Well that is a very glass half full way to look at it," said the man, who Foggy now knew was named Dr. Stephen Strange. 

"Well, the glass half empty way involves acknowledging that I was attacked by an evil sorcerer who cursed me to remain alive but also haunted by actual ghosts in a terrifying dreamworld of my own creation, so yeah... I'm gonna choose optimism right now if that's okay with you," Foggy told him, irritated. It was a testament to the insanity of Foggy's current circumstances, and of how much his existence had recently spiraled out of control, that the sorcerer part was the thing that had least surprised him when it was explained.

Strange held up his hands in acquiescence. "That's fair," he said. "But I just hope you also understand the magnitude of what is happening to you. I can't keep you here in the astral plane for much longer. Any moment now you'll be pulled back into the world that Mr. Evans unfortunately cast you into and I'm not even sure how much you'll remember about this conversation. It's okay to be... not fine... Mr. Nelson."

"Nope," Foggy told him. "Not an option. Tell me again how to fix this."

The doctor sighed. "There's no fixing it. Not really. As long as you have the responsibility of the death of others weighing on your conscience, you'll be trapped in your own mind answering to them. Somnambulance for the Desecrated is a very powerful spell. It has the power to retrieve souls from their final resting places, and it keeps the physical body and the conscious self of its victim separated until its work is done. It's lucky for you that you never actually murdered anyone."

"Right, but I already told you that I don't feel responsible for Jacob's father," Foggy asked. "He vanished and became literal dust in the wind. So why am I stuck like this?"

"The responsibility for the death intended by the spellcaster doesn't matter," Strange told him. "If you're still there, it's because there are other ghosts haunting your subconscious."

Foggy's mind flashed suddenly to the victims of Frank Castle. And others who he really hoped never to see again. 

"Mr. Nelson!" he heard, and he realized that he was floating backwards, being pulled back towards a prison of his own mind by a few stray thoughts. He took a breath, recognizing how metaphorical that was in the moment, but all he seemed to be doing was slowing his speed slightly.

"What do I do?" he asked, becoming hysterical. "I don't know what to do!"

Strange looked equally panicked for a moment, but then got a decisive look in his eyes. Foggy was astonished when the man closed his eyes, fell backwards, and forced an ethereal version of himself out of his physical body. Two strong arms then yanked Foggy forward sharply, and he found himself being held tightly by the sorcerer in an awkward hug, his momentum temporarily stalled.

"I can't come with you," Strange told him, whispering it right into his ear. "I'm sorry. It should never have gotten this far. I tried to get to Evans before Mordo corrupted him. I ran out of time and you paid the price."

"Tell me there's something I can do, Doctor," Foggy begged.

"Remember who you are and why you're there. And forgive yourself," Strange said. "Let them forgive you. Before it's too late."

"Too late for what?" Foggy asked, sensing himself being pulled out of Strange's grip, the void creeping back up his spine again. He was consumed by it before he could get an answer.


	4. Killer Instincts

He woke up on the floor again. He was in his office, or what used to be his office back before he'd walked away from Nelson and Murdock. Only it felt wrong now. He was wrong now.

He got to his feet and wiped the dust off himself, musing on their inability to ever keep the place clean, and looked up only to see that the back wall was missing a window. Hadn't it had one? He tried to remember, but found that he couldn't. He looked around, panicked, wondering if this was even his office at all. In place of the window was a bulletin board. It took up the whole wall. At the top, two playing cards were pinned. Foggy moved closer to examine them, and realized what they were. One, a Jack, had his eyes blacked out. The man in black, Foggy remembered. The other was a King, the Kingpin. Wilson Fisk. His heart beat faster at that thought, and as he moved backwards away from the wall he could swear he heard grunts and the thump of a foot kicking the floor behind him. Someone was choking. Was it him? He had to put his hand to his throat to check before he could take another breath.

"He did that for me, you know," a calm, steady voice said behind him and he turned around, surprised to see Fisk's weasel of an assistant sitting at a conference table in the corner looking just as smug as Foggy remembered him. What was he doing there?

What were either of them doing there? It took Foggy a moment for his own thought to catch up with him. There was a sorcerer. Right. He was here because he wasn't dead, and this world was only supposed to be populated with the ghosts of people Foggy felt responsible for.

"You're nobody to me," Foggy told him. "I don't feel responsible for what happened to you." He waited for the moment when the man whose name he couldn't remember turned to dust and was blown out the non-existent window that was supposed to be there.

"You never asked questions," Fisk's assistant told him. "You never wanted to. You were scared of what the answers might be."

"What are you talking about?" Foggy asked. In front of him, blood began seeping through the ghost's clean white dress shirt. So much blood, from so many places. Was that how it happened? Foggy had only ever been told that he'd been shot. He'd assumed it was a professional hit. That it had been quick and relatively painless.

"I imagine that Fisk told him that it was because of the visit to his mother," the man said, standing up. Wesley, Foggy finally remembered. That was his name. "But I know what I meant to him. What he would do to anyone who he thought hurt me."

The horrible choking noises filled the room again.

"Ben killed you?" Foggy asked. "That's..." He struggled to even fathom it. "It's impossible. He couldn't do that."

"No," Wesley said. "He didn't know me. You, though? You took my case, didn't you. Nelson and Murdock?"

"I didn't..." Foggy started to say before his mind went to that place he always hated it going. "Matt... What did he do? Wait... why am I listening to you? This is my world, I created it, and you're a liar anyway."

"You let me into your office and cashed my check," Wesley told him. He crept closer to Foggy, pushing Foggy backwards until he backed into something only to realize what it was and screamed, immediately stepping away again. John Healy. Or, at least, the body of John Healy. If Foggy hadn't heard a description of how the man had died, he would never have recognized him bent over unnaturally with a spike cleanly jammed between his eye socket and the back of his head.

"Oh God," Foggy said. "oh God, oh God", and now he was sobbing, terror-stricken at the sight of it.

"Do you really think God wants anything to do with you, Mr. Nelson?" Wesley asked him. "Look around."

Foggy didn't want to listen, didn't want to be forced to see. He closed his eyes tightly trying to avoid it, but he knew it wouldn't make them go away. When he opened them again, they were all there in the room with him. Healy, but also Officer Blake and Leland Owlsley, and a man Foggy didn't recognize but who he knew had been killed by the force of a bowling ball crushing in his skull. Collateral damage, all of them, of a war Foggy hadn't even known was going on in the shadows and back alleys of the place he'd once told Karen was nothing to be afraid of. And that sound, that sickening groaning and gagging, still filled the air.

"I didn't kill them!" Foggy screamed at him. "Or you. I cashed a check. That does not make me responsible."

"No, it doesn't," Wesley said. "But encouraging and protecting the person who is does."

"Matt didn't..." Foggy tried to say, but something stopped him. "He couldn't..." But he knew he didn't believe what he was about to say. He'd never asked Matt about any of them, not directly, but he'd had his suspicions once he'd learned about the man in black, about Matt's crusade. Had wondered about Matt's level of involvement in all of it.

Before he could stammer out anything else, he heard a series of loud cracks, gunshots, and before he had a chance to duck he felt the bullets slam into him. Time seemed to slow, and each one felt familiar. He counted them. There were seven of them. He looked up to find that they had passed through Wesley and into him. He clutched himself and watched the gushing blood seep out over his fingers. When he looked up again, his jaw dropped as he recognized the dainty freckled hands of Karen Page holding the gun, followed her arms up to see her staring at him with a steely look in her eyes. She said nothing, and Foggy could only gasp as his consciousness faded to black, the last thing he saw the stream of dust as Wesley was carried away.


	5. Who's He Got Left?

He heard things. Snippets of a memory as he returned to consciousness.

"I was starting to worry you might be in love with me," he had told her. "What other explanation could there be? You hang around my office all day. You refuse to leave. You're always at your desk. You gaze at me lovingly when you think I'm not looking."

He could hear her laughter, sweet and disbelieving, ringing in his ears as he opened his eyes.

"Are you alright?" a familiar voice asked.

"Yeah," he said to the man hovering over him, surprised to see him. "I'm fine. I"m always fine," He rubbed his chest absent-mindedly, looking down to find that his shirt was clean and the skin underneath was smooth and unbroken. "Are you though? That thing chasing us didn't get you earlier, did it Mr. Murdock?"

"Geez, Mr. Murdock sounds like my old man. Jack's fine," came the reply, "and it didn't get me. When I got out the door you weren't with me though. What happened to you?"

"What didn't?" Foggy asked. "What are you even doing here anyway?"

"What do you mean?" Jack asked him. Foggy noted that the robe was gone and the man in front of him was now dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

"I mean, this is my personal hell," Foggy explained. "It's supposed to be full of ghosts whose death I had something to do with. I'm pretty sure my best friend's dad who was killed by the Irish mob when I was 12 doesn't qualify."

"Best friend?" Jack said, surprise in his voice. He stood up and helped Foggy up with him. "That was him back there wasn't it? In Fogwell's?" A sob caught in his throat. "That was really him."

"Yeah," Foggy said sadly. "I'm sorry."

"No, that's..." Jack said, emotional. "That's okay. No, it's not, actually. You're so young. And he's lost you too, now? Who's he got left?"

Foggy's mind again wandered back to Karen Page. "I really don't know," he told Jack.

"He's alone, then?" Jack asked him.

Foggy looked around. He was back on the streets of Hell's Kitchen. It was daylight, but he didn't know if he could trust that to continue to be the case for very long. "I think he likes it that way," he told Jack, bitterly.

"Wouldn't you, if you were him?" Jack asked. "I'm here. You're here. Being alone means you can't lose anyone else."

Before Foggy could say anything in response to that, there was a scream. A woman's scream, piercing and desperate, from around the corner. Foggy ran without thinking, on instincts he couldn't explain and never realized he had. He slowed when he realized what he was doing but was already staring at the danger. It stopped him short and Jack almost slammed into him from behind. There was a woman standing at the end of an alley with her back to them. As Foggy examined her, he realized that she had to have been the one who screamed, but she wasn't screaming now. Instead, she was facing down a victim, bound and helpless, badly beaten and tied to a chair with rope in front of her. He was unconscious. And she had a knife.

"You don't have to..." Foggy yelled, unsure of what he was even doing. "You don't have to do this. Whatever this is."

The woman in the alley took a breath so deep that her entire body trembled with it. "I do," she said, her back still to them. Foggy could hear the sob in her voice. "It was for his protection. I knew he'd understand. I couldn't leave him to speak with the police. He knew who we were."

His heart started to pound again in his chest. He wondered if it had ever slowed or if he'd just stopped noticing until this moment. The moment she started speaking, he had realized who it was. That accent, warm and vaguely European, was hard to forget, even if he'd only met her a few times back in college. "Elektra," he said in a tone that surprised him for how calm it was. "Put down the knife."

Beside him, Jack took a step forward. "Wait..." Jack said. "I know him." Foggy recognized the same steely anger that sometimes crept into Matt's voice.

"Please, Elektra," Foggy begged again, brain scrambling to make sense of the situation. "Whoever this is, whatever you did for Matt. It's over now. He's not here with you."

Elektra turned slightly, her dark hair sliding down her back as she did, her long nose and high cheekbones coming into view. "But he is. He always is." She looked at him, and as Foggy turned around to follow her gaze his jaw dropped. He was there behind them, watching them. Matt.

Only not Matt, not really. This version of him had the same detached expression, the same sense of unreality and unresponsiveness that the Matt in the gym had displayed. He was young, younger than the one Foggy had left behind, but recognizable to Foggy as the version that he'd met at college. The version who had seemed to Foggy the very picture of naivety and innocence once but seemed sinister now staring intently, if vacantly as ever, at Elektra, his knuckles bloody and bruised.

"No," Jack said, "This isn't what I..." There was panic in his voice. And disbelief. He was examining the man in the chair. "I would never have asked for this." He turned to face the ghost of the man who was once his son. "Not ever. How could you think I would want this?"

Foggy looked at Jack. "Who was he?" He knew he wouldn't like the answer.

"Roscoe Sweeney," Jack replied. "He..." The sentence trailed off as Jack's focus remained on Matt.

"He killed you," Foggy said.

"And I killed him," Elektra said, reminding them she was there. When they turned around, it was over. Roscoe Sweeney's blood was running freely down his chest now, his throat slit, and Elektra's hands were crimson with it. "He couldn't. So I did."

Foggy turned back again to look at the Matt who wasn't real, standing there unmoved by everything around him. "Did he know?" he asked. "What you did? Who you were then?"

When he turned back to Elektra, she was nodding slowly. Foggy watched as the knife fell from her hands and clattered to the pavement, and suddenly he felt like his lungs couldn't take in air. He was falling forward, reeling, trying to catch his breath. This had happened. Foggy knew that now. What he was experiencing was the truth, the untarnished version of it and not the one that Matt decided that he should know, thought he could handle. Matt had to have been walking around with this, living with this, in their classes and in their dorm room. He had to have sat next to Foggy and joked with him, let him go on about the Star Wars prequels and his sister's new boyfriend and his anger at discontinued flavours of Doritos, while this moment hovered over all of it. Foggy had asked Matt, demanded to know that horrible night, if what they had was ever real. He hadn't gotten an answer from Matt then, but now he knew that it wasn't. Not ever.

He thought about Karen Page's steady hands pointing a gun at him. Had he ever known anyone?

He saw two long legs attached to heeled boots come into his view, and looked up slowly to see Elektra staring down at him. "What are you even doing here?" he asked her. "This is my hell. And it's supposed to be for the dead."

Foggy realized that the dark had swept over everything again and he hadn't noticed. And that behind Elektra, an unnatural darkness, a shadow was forming. And it was growing. She shivered, aware of its presence and terrified, but stayed where she was.

"Oh, Foggy," she told him, and cupped his chin with her bloody hands. They were cold. "I am dead. Or at least I'm supposed to be. Thought I'd escape them that way."

And suddenly Foggy heard things again. Voices carried on the wind from all around him, snippets of memories. But these weren't his.

"No, Elektra." Matt's voice, sobbing. "They have nothing now," Elektra told him. "I took it all away. I know, I know now what it feels to be good."

"Who are you running from?" Foggy asked, tears welling up.

"Your little prison kept me safe for a while. But I can't keep hiding here," she told him. The shadow behind her began to whine, that same distinctive sound that Foggy had heard earlier in the gym, intense and painful.

"What's happening?" Foggy asked.

"The end," she said. The shadow advanced, engulfing her slowly. "And Foggy?" she asked him as she vanished before his eyes. "He loved me. But he loved you too, you know."

Matt's voice crept in on all sides again, whispers as the whine faded. "This, Elektra," Matt said. "This is a part of me that I need. And you're the only one who gets it. Without this, I'm not alive. And I know that now, thanks to you."


	6. Jumping to Conclusions

And then everything was quiet. And the sun was shining down again. Foggy took a moment to breathe deeply, to let his adrenaline fade and the pounding in his chest returned to normal. 

He startled when he felt a steady hand on his shoulder, only to look up and realize that it was Jack. He was still there.

"I'm sorry," Foggy told him.

Jack just took a breath. "It's not your fault," he said.

"Isn't it?" Foggy asked. "I thought I knew him, you know. I thought I was his friend." He got back up to his feet. 

"Does that matter? He was yours, wasn't he?" Jack asked him.

"Yes," Foggy replied, without hesitation, surprising himself with how certain he was. "I trusted him. And relied on him. I was all in. I told you, he was my best friend."

"But not anymore?" Jack replied.

Foggy sighed as the certainty vanished. "I don't know," Foggy told him. "I wish you'd stop asking me questions like that."

"Why?" Jack asked.

Foggy opened his mouth to answer, but realized he couldn't. He wasn't sure what that meant. "What do we do now?" he asked instead.

"You tell me," Jack said. "As you've said a couple times now, this is your world. We're all just stuck in it with you."

"I still don't understand why that is," Foggy said. "Wesley? Elektra? And you? Why you? It makes no sense."

He looked up at the now perfectly blue sky overhead, as though answers might appear from on high. "I forgive myself!" he yelled. "Okay? Is that what I'm supposed to say? I don't feel responsible for the things other people did anymore! And I certainly don't feel responsible for the death of..." he trailed off as he looked around and realized that the person whose name he was about to say had vanished again. Even the streets were gone, transported the moment he'd looked away to at least a dozen stories below the roof he was suddenly standing on.

"Dammit!" Foggy said, frustrated. He paced angrily and looked back up, wishing that the sky would just darken again and stop taunting him with its peaceful calmness. "I didn't kill anyone! I get it!" he pleaded. "Can I go now? Please?"

"Somehow I don't think that'll do it, son," a deep baritone voice said to his left. He gasped in recognition and turned around slowly, anticipating a tragedy.

Instead, there was only the once familiar and now anticlimactic sight of Ben Urich, looking just as he had the last time Foggy had seen him. Right down to the curious expression on his face.

"I don't think it really required a reporter for me to figure that out," Foggy told him, "but I'm actually glad you're here. And not haunting me. At least not in the traditional sense. By which I mean that you look like yourself and aren't, you know... choking to death currently in front of me. Thanks for that."

Ben chuckled. "I wish I could say I was glad to see you too," Ben said. 

"I know," Foggy replied, knowing what he meant. "But if it helps, I'm not dead? At least I don't think I am... yet. It's kinda hard for me to know at this point. It wasn't really very well explained."

"You said I'm supposed to haunt you?" Ben asked, looking amused. "What, I'm supposed to show you the past or the future like something out of Dickens?"

Foggy shrugged, sheepish. "I don't know what to tell you. I've just been wandering around aimlessly trying to figure it out. I was told I'm supposed to be figuring out how to forgive myself for the people whose deaths are on my conscience. Or convincing them to forgive me? I've got no idea how this is supposed to work. Hence the yelling at the sky."

"Do you feel responsible for my death, Mr. Nelson?" Ben asked him, stepping forward.

Foggy took a deep breath, and steeled himself for what he knew he had to do. "Yes," he told Ben, "I do."

"Why?" Ben asked him, ever the reporter and genuinely wanting to know. "We both knew what Wilson Fisk was capable of. And you? You had nothing to do with it."

"No," Foggy said. "I didn't. But..." he tried to work through what he was feeling, remembered the bulletin board with its pinned up playing cards, and Wesley's calm accusations. "But Karen did," Foggy finally continued, making it both a statement and a question.

Ben sighed softly. "She got in over her head," he said. "We both did."

"But only one of you paid for it," Foggy told him.

"Doesn't matter," Ben said.

"Doesn't it?" Foggy asked him. "You had a wife! She was sick and she needed you. And we pushed you to help us. We got you involved."

"Funny how you started off saying Karen and now you've turned it back into we, Mr. Nelson," Ben said. "Which is it?"

Foggy reeled as he realized what Ben had pointed out to him.

"You're a good man," Ben told him, "Karen and your partner Murdock, they're good people too. They just also know that sometimes good isn't enough to make a difference in the world."

Foggy scoffed at that. "So I'm naive, then? I'm too trusting, not tough enough?"

"No," Ben said, "On the contrary, you're smarter than you think, and than other people realize. You want to see the best in people, even when they can't see it in themselves, and even when you know that you could be wrong. You trust people because you know that sometimes they need to be trusted by someone in order to trust themselves. That's why you're important. You remind people that sometimes good is the only thing that can make a difference, and that they just need to be able to recognize it in themselves."

"That is..." Foggy wasn't sure how to respond to that. He didn't know whether to be flattered or frustrated by it.

"Observant?" Ben asked him. "I'm a pretty good reader of people. Or at least I was."

At that, Foggy remembered the point of this conversation, remembered what he was supposed to be doing. "You were," he told Ben. "And I'm sorry."

"Like I said," Ben said, "It wasn't your fault. Don't carry that burden for somebody else because you think that they don't, or can't. Let it go, son."

He wanted to. He wished that it could be that simple. But it wasn't. And so Ben stubbornly remained there in front of him, even his long coat refusing to be moved by the wind.

Then, to their left, they both suddenly heard a gentle sobbing, punctuated by incoherent muttering. "Can't do this," they heard. "Devil's gonna get me." They turned to see a man standing on the ledge of the roof next to them, swaying clumsily.

"Sir?" Ben asked.

"Hey, buddy," Foggy said at the same time. They both began to walk over, cautious.

"What did I do?" the figure continued to mutter. "I'm garbage."

"Sir!" Ben said again concerned.

Finally, the man seemed to realize that he wasn't alone and turned. When he did, they both recoiled slightly. There were track marks up his arms, and heavy bruising on his face. Most of his teeth were missing.

"Who are you?" Foggy asked, confused. "What are you doing here?"

"I did a bad thing," came the reply between sobs. "Such a bad thing."

"What did you do?" Ben asked gently.

As they talked, Foggy finally saw the darkness descend on them, like a sunset on fast forward. It descended quickly and heavily over everything, and it cast long shadows over them all. "I need to die," the man told them.

"Nobody needs to die," Ben replied. "Come on now and step back before you fall." He motioned to the man to come to them. Foggy watched and wondered about it all while they were talking, not piecing it together until he noticed a long shadow undeneath them, illuminated by streetlights, moving slowly to envelope his and Ben's from behind. It was tall and distorted, but Foggy could clearly make out the devil horns inching their way towards the shaking, sobbing mess on the ledge.

"It's okay," he heard Ben saying, gently. But Foggy could suddenly only see red.

"You're afraid?" he asked the man, laughing suddenly. "You should be, you piece of shit!" he screamed in anger. "What are you waiting for? For me to accept responsibility for you too! I wish I cared, but I don't. Just jump already!"

"Wait! Calm down, now!" Ben said, surprised. "You're okay. We're all friends here. What do you have to be afraid of?"

But it was too late. "That," the man said, his entire arm extended to point in terror behind them. 

They both turned, with Foggy prepared to be even angrier at the sight of a menacing Daredevil set on retribution, about to turn what had once been Foggy's angry hypothetical imaginings into a sick reality. Instead, he felt his anger vanish breathlessly, his heart immediately feeling heavy enough to sink into his stomach. "Mrs. Cardenas?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, Senor Foggy," she cried out, clutching the bleeding wound in her chest. "What is happening?"

Ben could only look on sadly as Foggy's feet moved him towards the frail, scared senior on instinct. "I'm sorry," Foggy told her. "I'm so sorry."

"There..." Elena said, pointing urgently. "That man... He jump!" she told them. They turned around, but it was too late. They hadn't even heard it happen. Her killer was gone. "He jump!" Mrs. Cardenas said again, upset.

"He did," Foggy told her. "He felt bad. For..." he could barely continue, didn't want to have to be the one to tell her. "For killing you."

Elena panicked slightly at that, looking down at the blood pouring over her own hand as though seeing it for the first time. "Oh!" she said, looking from Foggy to Ben and then back. "He did! He did that!"

Foggy and Ben both nodded.

She staggered forward and grabbed Foggy's arm, pulling him in close towards her. "But you yell, Senor Foggy? So angry. For me?"

"Of course, Elena," Foggy told her. "He killed you. Because of me."

"What?" Elena asked. "No, oh no. He steal."

"No," Foggy told her, shaking his head. "Fisk hired him. Because of your case. Because I told you to fight. I told you that we'd help you, that you shouldn't give up. I was wrong. I'm so sorry."

"But you angry?" she asked him. "You say for him to jump. You hate. You not hate, Senor Foggy. You help me. You smile. Good man." She patted him on the cheek with her unbloodied hand.

"Don't say that," Foggy told her. "I'm not, Elena."

"Yes," she said. "I not take no for an answer. You..." she couldn't seem to find the word. "Perdonar," she said. "I don't know..."

But he'd understood the word. He wasn't sure how, but the meaning had come through loud and clear. Perdonar. Forgive.

"Perdonar?" he tried to imitate back.

"Si, Senor Foggy. I ask you to. Please."

He'd never been able to say no to her. He smiled slightly. "Si, Senora," he told her. "Anything for you."

And he fell to his knees and hung his head, smiling softly, as she vanished into dust. Behind him, footsteps made their way towards him. He felt a steady hand on his shoulder.

"Didn't I tell you? People need you," Ben told him. He nodded, and felt Ben vanish too.


	7. What Price Justice?

When he looked up, he was on the street again and the bright sunlight and blue sky were mocking him. He wandered again, alone. Another possible eternity. Another set of roads that all led back to the same place. It was exhausting. But he never tired.

If he was being honest with himself, he felt lighter than before. His conversations with Ben and Elena had loosened something inside of him, removed some of the weight that he hadn't even realized he had been carrying. He felt like now he might actually get somewhere. Like this world didn't need to be a prison.

But he was still trapped in it, nonetheless. Knowing the only people who he still needed to face.

"Come on!" he yelled as he walked. "I know you're here! I'm not afraid of you anymore."

She was on a park bench when he finally found her. She was sitting alone holding a patched up stuffed giraffe, dyed hair loosely piled on top of her head and wearing the same Fordham sweatshirt that he'd watched her die in. He sat down quietly next to her and waited for her to speak.

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

"She knows," Foggy told her, trying to inject his voice with some certainty. "Wherever she is, she knows."

Reyes looked up at him, surprise in her eyes. "I wasn't apologizing to her. No apology would ever be good enough anyway."

"You're sorry about me?" Foggy asked her. "Why? You didn't kill me. I'm still not even sure if I'm really dead."

Reyes chuckled darkly, annoyed. "Figures that you can't even just accept a sincere apology. Forever a pain in my ass."

"I'm genuinely confused though," Foggy said, looking at her. "What the hell do you have to apologize to me for? I was the asshole who antagonized the Blacksmith by convincing Castle to plead not guilty and prolonging his case. Hell, I was the one dumb enough to put that asshole on the stand as a character witness! You were right. I was too green to know what the hell I was doing. Right out of law school and I choose to start my own firm. We take three murder cases in our short lifespan and end up with one client with a trail of bodies behind her who is nowhere near as innocent as we thought, another dead under the shadiest of circumstances, and the third destined for death row no matter what we did and who cost your daughter her mother. I'd say I'm a little more than just a pain in your ass. I deserve to be here being haunted by you."

Reyes clutched the stuffed giraffe tighter and looked up with tears in her eyes, defiantly even less angry than she had been. "See that's why I need to apologize. That right there. Because you are a good attorney, Nelson. And I don't even just mean good in the sense that you defend your clients vigorously and explore every possible opportunity to advocate for them, which you do. You're good in a sense that I'd forgotten any lawyer could be as a DA. You're moral. You care about doing what's right. Hell, you believe that there is a right thing to do at all! Do you have any idea how rare that is?"

"Come on," Foggy told her. "Why do people keep making such a big deal out of that? I've never done anything that anyone else wouldn't have or couldn't have done better."

"Bullshit!" Reyes told him. "Me sitting here next to you is proof of that. I had a job that let me shape the justice system of an entire city. I could have done immeasurable good for millions of people. And I abused it, putting people in harm's way to protect my own reputation. We both know I did. You had me pegged from the moment we met. And let me tell you, there's not a politician or lawyer who I've ever met who wouldn't have done exactly what I did. You took on Fisk. You know better than most exactly how crooked the system really is and the temptations people face and fail to fight every day."

"Maybe," Foggy told her. "But if I'm one of the good ones, then maybe I should just stay here. Why go back to a world that's doomed anyway." He thought about Matt's world on fire. About the things Matt must hear, must experience every day. The things that compelled him to put on the mask. What kind of world was that, really?

"Because it needs you," she said forcefully. "Because you have people who need you." She looked down again at the toy in her hands.

"Please," Foggy told her dismissively. "So I'm good? It doesn't mean I'm any good to them."

"Maybe not," Reyes replied, "But you're not doing anybody any good here." She swept her hand out and suddenly there they were again. The victims of Frank Castle laid out in the street like it was a battleground. None of them moving this time, thankfully. He forced himself to look at them, each of them, one by one. Grotto and the rest of the Irish. The Colombian cartel. The Dogs of War. His eyes lingered on one biker in particular, with a closely shaved head and a tattoo that said "Mother". Smitty.

"I knew him," Foggy told Reyes, pointing. "Took the case anyway. Defended the man who murdered him. Some friend I am."

"Like I said," Reyes reminded him. "You're no good to him now either way."

"It doesn't matter," Foggy told her. "I'm stuck here. How can I forgive myself or expect them to forgive me? I robbed them of any chance at justice." Reyes didn't disagree.

They sat there for a moment as the sun set again, and the darkness descended only slowly this time, more peacefully. As Foggy continued to pay his respects to each of the people in front of him, his eyes widened at a particular set of bodies, huddled together and out of place. A blonde woman in her thirties. A blonde girl who looked like a miniature of her mother, the similarities were so striking. A young boy with scruffy dark hair.

"Castle's family?" Foggy asked Reyes hesitantly, pointing.

"Yes," she replied tensely.

"That's..." Foggy tried to say, but wasn't sure how to phrase it. "Why are they here?"

"What do you mean?" she asked, confused.

"I don't feel responsible for them," he told her.

"You shouldn't," she said. "If anything, you should feel proud that you were the only one who really tried to understand their husband, their father. You forget that you may have gotten in the way of justice for Castle's victims, but nobody even cared about justice for them. Nobody but you and your friends." A tear rolled down her cheek and she sniffled.

Foggy took a breath and leaned back on the bench, realizing that she was right. Regardless of the kind of man Frank became, what they'd done? Allowing Frank a chance to find his family's killer, and ensuring that the public heard about Frank's service, about who he'd been once? That he had no regrets about.

"They're haunting you? They have been this whole time, haven't they?" he finally asked Reyes, understanding washing over him.

Reyes nodded slowly. "They're my ghosts. Don't let them be yours too." She looked at him and before he could respond she'd slipped away from him, along with everyone else. Foggy closed his eyes gently and braced himself, expecting the whooshing sensation he'd felt the last time he'd been pulled from his purgatory. Only it never came.

He opened his eyes again. Daylight again, but he was still on the same bench, the same street. But who was left to forgive?


	8. We All Make Choices

He never left the bench. He didn't really see a reason to. Wandering never got him anywhere except where he was supposed to be, so he figured that if he sat there whatever it was would come to him eventually.

And come it did, dramatically, in the form of a giant truck full of chemicals screeching its way down the street in front of him from out of nowhere. It moved as if in slow motion, flickering like a projection of an old movie, and Foggy felt compelled to do nothing but watch as an old man suddenly appeared in front of it, and a small figure leaped in front of him to push him out of the way on time. Matt. He lay in the street afterwards, clutching at his eyes, shaking and crying, as the old man vanished into thin air.

"It's my fault," a voice said from behind Foggy, and he wasn't really surprised by it.

"It wasn't," he told Jack. "It was just Matt being Matt. Always the hero."

"Yeah, well where do you think that came from?" Jack told him, moving around the bench to sit down in the spot Reyes had once occupied.

Foggy sighed. "Why are you here, Jack?" he asked.

"I don't know," Jack replied. "You tell me."

Foggy could only stare at him, frustrated.

"I'm not responsible for your death," he finally stated.

"No," Jack told him, "You're really not. That's another thing that was my fault. We all make choices."

"You didn't choose to die!" Foggy said. "To leave him!"

"I chose to put a principle ahead of being there for him," Jack said. "I wanted to teach him a lesson. Apparently, it stuck. But I never really thought about how he'd apply it."

They sat there for a moment, looking out towards the now empty street. The truck screeched in again, the scene on a loop.

"It'll put him in a place like this, sooner rather than later, won't it?" Jack asked.

"Probably," Foggy said.

"And you're just okay with that?" Jack asked him.

Foggy laughed sadly. "No!" he replied. "Of course not! Do you think...?" he struggled to continue. "Do you think I like this? We were Nelson and Murdock! Inseparable. Everything to each other. Losing him feels like..." Foggy choked up thinking about it. "Like losing half of myself."

"You say that like it's inevitable," Jack told him.

"Isn't it?" Foggy asked desperately. "Who am I, in the face of..." he again struggled, finally gesturing wildly to the chaotic scene that was playing out once more in front of them. "All of this. The hero thing. What he can do. Who he's supposed to be. The chosen one who must fight an army of ninjas in armour and a mask. Who am I to tell him that I'm more important than any of that?"

"Who says you have to be more important than that?" Jack asked. "Maybe you just need to be more important than that to him."

"Like he was to you?" Foggy knew that he was lashing out, and that his words would sting. He hoped that they did. "It's like you said. Like father, like son. His principles will always come first. And I'll always be second. He made that perfectly clear."

"So you just let him be right about you, then? You let a dead woman be the only person who ever understood him?" Jack demanded to know. "He let you in."

"No!" Foggy cried out, standing up to walk away and having to weave around a broken fire hydrant to do it. "That's not fair. He didn't! He never gave me a chance to really understand!"

"Well maybe you should try a little harder!" Jack told him, following. "Instead of doing exactly what you accuse him of doing, pushing him away because you figure you'll lose him either way."

At this, Foggy turned around to confront his accuser. "What the hell do you know about it anyway? You don't have the first clue about what I've done to try and be there for him! Or who he is! Hell, I've actually known Matt for longer than you ever did. You left him alone, and now you get to keep chilling out here and he's my responsibility. Always has been. From the moment we met. Because you were right earlier. He doesn't have anybody else."

"I know," Jack said. "I know and I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well your sorry is worth nothing. Because you meant everything to Matt. What you did that day in that fight with Creel? It shaped him. It became everything he ever wanted to be. But I don't know what to do anymore, okay? I don't know how to keep him on that path, to help him live up to the example you set for him. I thought I did. I thought I was doing it. But I never was. I've always been..."

Foggy choked up as he realized what he was about to say. And in that moment he realized why Jack was there. Why Jack needed to forgive him and he needed to forgive Jack.

"I've always been a failure," he sputtered out. "I failed him. I'm sorry." He looked back at Jack, who seemed to have had a similar realization.

"It's alright," Jack said after a moment. "It's okay. You're right. I didn't mean to put that on you just now, I just..."

"You can't be there," Foggy finished for him. "You need someone to be. He needs someone to be."

"Maybe," Jack told him. "But it's not up to us."

"No," Foggy said, taking a deep breath. "It's not."

Finally, at long last, the whooshing sound returned. And everything faded away.


	9. Love Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

The first thing that returned to him was his hearing. He could hear the beeping of the heart monitor, the rolling of carts and bed wheels along the tile floor. He was in a hospital.

Opening his eyes took longer, his sight finally confirming his realization. Fluorescent lights. He turned his head slightly to take in the room, and saw a human-sized lump buried under a blanket on a chair next to his bed. Foggy was briefly confused until he took in the familiar white cane propped up next to the chair and the red-tinted glasses sitting on the window ledge next to him. Matt.

His mind still tried to piece together where he'd just been, everything he'd experienced. Had he dreamed it? It had felt so real, but yet here he was, and he could feel it all fading slowly away from him with every passing second he was awake.

He wasn't sure how long he lay there like that, staring at Matt and desperately trying to hang onto remnants of a nightmare, but eventually Matt's eyes fluttered open, still unseeing. It took him a moment to realize Foggy was awake. Foggy could see the very moment that it hit him, could tell by the way his whole body stiffened and he sniffled slightly, his red-rimmed eyes starting to tear up again.

"Foggy?" Matt asked in shock.

Foggy nodded, and then remembered that narration always helped even if it wasn't strictly necessary. "I just nodded, buddy."

Matt leapt from his chair faster than Foggy thought could be possible even for someone with superpowers, wrapping him in an awkward horizontal hug so tight that they both struggled to breathe. Foggy thought about making a joke, but was stopped short by the sensation of Matt's body shaking and trembling, and of wet snot soaking through his hospital gown. Matt was sobbing, giant broken heaving sobs like Foggy had never heard before. 

He started to tear up too. He couldn't help himself. It was as though every emotion he'd felt in the dream world he'd just woken up from hit him at once and overwhelmed him. And so they both just lay there, crying into each other's shoulders waiting for it to pass until finally a surprised nurse had to come in and pull Matt away from him, handing them both tissues and checking to ensure that they hadn't pulled Foggy's IV or catheter out.

When she left to go get a doctor, Foggy leaned back and looked back over at Matt, finally taking in how exhausted he looked. "So you've been here awhile, huh?" he asked.

Matt nodded, and answered the question Foggy had left unasked. "A month and a half."

Foggy's eyes widened in surprise. "That long?"

Matt nodded again, and more tears began to fall. "The doctors didn't think you'd ever wake up."

A deep, articulate voice rang in Foggy's head telling him that he'd been cursed. To ensure that he wasn't too late. But Foggy wasn't sure whether to trust it as real anymore. "I made it out," Foggy said. "I'm here now. I'm alive."

"Yeah," Matt said smiling. "You are. I'm so sorry, Foggy."

"For what?" Foggy asked.

"Do you remember what happened?" Matt asked him.

"Evans' son," Foggy recalled. "He attacked me."

"I tried to stop him," Matt said. "I was too late. He did something. The doctors said they didn't even know what. You were just gone. There was nothing they could do. And Evans..."

"Did you hurt him?" Foggy interrupted. "Is he dead?"

"No," Matt said, looking offended. "I wanted to though. But I knew you wouldn't have..." he trailed off. "He's in prison now. 

"Good," Foggy said. "I still don't get what you're sorry for though."

"I should have been there. I should have..."

"What, Matt? Should have what?" Foggy asked him. "What could you have done? You're here now. That's what matters."

"No, it's not," Matt said. "I let other people distract me from what was important. From who was important."

Foggy smiled a little at that, surprised but also touched to hear Matt acknowledge it out loud. "Are we still talking about what Evans did?" Foggy asked.

"Are you okay?" Matt asked. "Are we?"

Foggy sighed, thinking. His mind turned to vague half-remembered visions of a man who looked remarkably like Matt, of a ten year old kid beating a punching bag, and of a bloody body tied to a chair.

"No," he finally said solemnly. "We're not okay, Matt. Either of us. And I am not fine. I haven't been fine in a long time."

"I'm sorry," Matt muttered. "I'm so sorry."

"You don't have to be though," Foggy told him. "That's the thing. You are who you are. And I can't keep pretending that I know who that is."

"You know me, Foggy," Matt said. "Better than anyone."

"Better than Elektra?" Foggy asked, a whispered confession that wasn't meant to be heard by him seeming to echo in the room. 

Matt hung his head. "Elektra doesn't matter now," he told Foggy. "That's over. She's gone now. Dead." There was a moment of silence as he allowed Foggy to process the confession. "I wanted to tell you, but I couldn't. I didn't want to deal with your reaction, I expected false sympathy. But I want us to start over now. You were right. We can't have secrets between us. You asked me to be honest and I kept lying. And it drove you away."

Foggy snorted. "I left, Matt. It takes two people to dissolve a partnership. You didn't have to drive me away. I was relieved to get out."

"A sane reaction, given that I made things pretty unbearable towards the end. I'll admit that. I know that I made mistakes. I want to do better."

"Can you though?" Foggy asked. "I think I'm finally realizing that the devil inside of you doesn't go away, Matt, whether she's around or not and whether you're going out at night in the mask or not. And I want to understand," Foggy told him. "I sort of already do, honestly. I know it's never seemed that way. I gave you shit that night, the night I found out, about Mrs. Cardenas' killer jumping off the roof, but I wasn't unhappy that it happened. You're right. Sometimes there is no justice. And sometimes there is, but it's just out of reach and hard to find. Whenever you'd tell me those stories about people you'd helped, about our own clients even, I understood why. I guess I just never really understood why you, you know? I only ever felt rejected, and hated all the ways that I was losing you. That I could lose you."

"I don't want to die, Foggy," Matt told him. "And sitting here all these weeks, thinking..." he couldn't continue. "I realized that I never thought about what it would do to you. To have to sit. To have to wait and wonder. Maybe to never even know." He was crying again, distraught.

"But that's the thing, isn't it?" Foggy asked him. "We both expected it to be you. It could just as easily have been me. Because we can't know what will happen. We can only do the best that we can with the time we have. And I've realized that for me that means spending it with you. The real you. Not the person I want you to be."

"What if I don't want you to know that person?" Matt asked. "What if they don't deserve you?"

"Well," Foggy told him, "If I have to realize that I can't control your choices, then you have to realize that you can't control mine. It's not up to you to decide what I deserve, Matt, or what I can handle. You're right. You promised me honesty. But I wasn't being honest with you or myself. You say you want to start over, and we can. But first we have to forgive each other. And ourselves. Can you do that, Matt?"

Matt smiled slightly and nodded his head. "I think I can," he said. "Can you?"

"At this point," Foggy told him, nodding happily, "I'm actually getting pretty good at it."


	10. We Dream Lots of Silly Things

Foggy's return to the land of the living shocked and confused the majority of the doctors at Metro-General. They weren't sure what put him into a coma to begin with, and so they were at a total loss when it came to explaining why he'd woken up. 

Foggy was pleased to learn that Matt had honoured his living will and pulled the plug on him when necessary. It was one more slightly disturbing reminder that, when it came right down to it, Matt was his friend, maybe always was in his own way. He'd had to shoo the man away from his hospital room for the final few days of his stay while his strength returned and the doctors checked him out to ensure he was in the clear for any future medical problems. Apparently Matt had been living off of money willed to him by Elektra, but that didn't mean he didn't have errands and bills to attend to that he'd been neglecting.

As Foggy recovered, his memories of the world he'd created for himself, of the ghosts he'd seen there, slipped further and further away until he was convinced that he had dreamed them, that they were a side effect of hospital medications or the trauma that had caused his coma. But still, odd snippets of things lingered in his consciousness, refusing to dissipate. A new distance between him and Karen emerged when she showed up to visit him that he couldn't really explain. But, for the most part, his life began to go back to normal.

On his last day in the hospital, a doctor he'd never seen before came to visit him, fussing with his pillows and asking him questions about his mental state.

"Did you dream at all?" she asked him.

"I'm sorry," he replied, confused by the question.

"In the coma? Did you dream?" she asked again. "Most patients don't remember if they did or didn't, but it's possible."

"I think so," he told her.

"Do you remember it?" she asked him.

"Vaguely?" he said. "It's all sort of hazy. I think it was a nightmare, though. Only a sort of... calming one?"

The doctor nodded at him like that made sense.

A nurse poked her head into the room after that. "Doctor Palmer?" the nurse asked. "What are you doing in here? Stephen is here looking for you."

She left his bedside, but stopped herself at the door. "I'm really, really glad that you're alright, Mr. Nelson. You had us all worried."

Foggy's eyes widened as he watched her leave and greet a man in the reception area outside his room. He was stern-looking, with a mustache. And for some reason, Foggy suddenly had a vision of him wearing a flowing red cape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to acknowledge my usage of the "It was all a dream! Or was it?" trope, the title of this chapter was taken from the Wizard of Oz.
> 
> It's what Auntie Em says to Dorothy at the end after she famously says "But it wasn't a dream. It was a place! And you, and you, and you, and you were there! But you couldn't have been, could you?"


End file.
